Author: Gina

24 June - 5 July 2019
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology,
Delft, The Netherlands

THEMES
Housing is of key importance for societies. It drives the economy and is a key issue for sustainable urban and regional development in growing as well as declining areas. This course focuses on sustainable housing development and deals with environmental as well as economic and social sustainability. How do housing markets work and how do governments intervene? How can the affordability, quality and energy efficiency of the housing stock be improved?

The course will give insight into the European perspective on the development of sustainable housing stock by presenting European and national goals, policies, regulations, assessment tools, process innovations and management approaches.

PARTICIPATION
We invite Bachelor students, Master students and Ph.D. students in their final year with background knowledge and research interests on sustainable housing and the built environment. There are limited places available.

The summer program is designed to suit for the expectations of the participants for attending two weeks program. The full attendance of the programme is the prerequisite for receiving the certificate of participation.
The summer school aims to attract international participants in the field of sustainable housing and built environment. Summer school 2016&2017 has successfully attracted worldwide participants. A quick geographical overview of participants’ profile: Hong Kong, China, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, South Africa, Nigeria, Australia, Spain, Greece, Turkey, India, The United Arab Emirates, Slovenia, Antigua and Barbuda.

APPLICATION
Your application should include a convincing motivation letter, a short CV (2 pages maximum) and a summary of research interests (1-page maximum).
Please submit your application by 31 May 2019 to Martine de Jong-Lansbergen M.M.M.deJong-Lansbergen@tudelft.nl (secretary congress office.
After approval of your application please register within 10 working days to guarantee your place at the Summer School (you will receive info where to register).

There are limited places available. An early application is highly recommended. Considering the high demand and potential oversubscription, the evaluation will be based on the quality of the application considering first come first served, meaning the programme will close once it becomes full.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy announced 12 topics to fund more than 100 new projects, totaling approximately $20 million as part of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) research programs. Five of the announced topics focus on building technologies:

Next Generation Residential Air Handlers

DOE is seeking the development of air handlers with improved motor designs and new system configurations that utilize advanced computational fluid dynamics modelling to reduce energy consumption by at least 25% while improving HVAC performance by at least 5%.

Novel Materials and Processes for Solid-State Lighting

DOE is seeking development of materials for light-emitting diodes, organic light-emitting diodes, and optical materials for high-efficiency luminaires that show promise to achieve the predicted and requisite performance advancements and risk limitations to advance to successive stages of research.

Automated Point Mapping for Commercial Buildings

DOE is seeking the development of innovative, early-stage algorithmic solutions to the currently laborious and expensive process of tagging and mapping individual points of a building’s sensors, actuators, and controllers, which stands as one of the largest barriers to automated fault detection and diagnostics implementation.

DOE is seeking the development of new and emerging data science techniques with possible relevance to building technology research projects – especially those with a focus on demand reduction and flexibility, critical water issues, and resiliency – to counteract the lack of data standardization that often prevents the “fusion” of disparate data sets and inhibits the effectiveness of advanced building technology testing and validation.

Letters of intent are due on Monday, January 7, 2019, at 5:00pm ET. Applicants should review the FY19 Phase I Release 2 funding opportunity announcement on the DOE SBIR and STTR website for directions on how to submit a letter of intent.

The State of California Department of General Services released their policy that provides direction to state agencies that build, lease and operate state buildings, on reducing indoor pollutant levels and ensuring healthful indoor environments for occupants in new, renovated, leased, and existing state buildings, as directed in Governor’s Executive Order B- 18-12 and the Green Building Action Plan.

The Green Building Action Plan requires State agencies to implement measures to ensure a healthful indoor environment for their building occupants as follows:

New/Renovated State Buildings: State agencies shall implement mandatory measures and relevant and feasible voluntary measures of the California Green Building Standards Code (CALGreen), Part 11, related to indoor environmental quality (IEQ) that are in effect at the time of new construction or alteration. The information is available at http://www.bsc.ca.gov/home/calgreen.aspx

Existing State Buildings: When accomplishing Alterations, Modifications, and Maintenance Repairs and when relevant and feasible, state agencies shall implement the mandatory and voluntary measures of the California Green Building Standards Code (CALGreen) , Part 11, related to indoor environmental quality.

New and Renegotiated State Leased Buildings: The Department of General Services (DGS) will encourage Lessors to implement measures of the California Green Building Standards Code (CALGreen) related to indoor environmental quality, where economically feasible, for all new or renegotiated leases.

The Code documents the following major steps to ensure a healthful indoor environment:

1. Use indoor products and materials that emit little or no harmful chemicals;
2. Provide appropriate ventilation, filtration and proper Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) equipment maintenance;
3. Prevent water intrusion and the growth of mold;
4. Implement line of sight and “daylighting” for new buildings; and
5. Solicit feedback from tenants every two years

BTUS researchers recently presented energy-savings results from 73 commercial building owners and operators who are using Energy Management and Information Systems (EMIS) at their sites. In its second year of operation, the Smart Energy Analytics Campaign has gathered and analyzed data from over 400 million square feet of install space for efficiency insights and savings achieved by owners that are implementing EMIS, along with associated technology costs.

Looking around the typical home or office, many homeowners and employees will find a staggering amount of technology on display: the refrigerator that keeps our food fresh; the thermostat that controls room temperature; the array of electronics to enable (and sometimes impede) our productivity; the lights that make tasks visible at night.

“As this large technology base continues to grow, the number of ways that a building can use energy grows with it, meaning that the best opportunities for saving energy in buildings are always changing,” said Jared Langevin, research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “What’s more, the pace of change is relatively quick—ask a homeowner from the year 2000 what they think of smart thermostats or where they buy their LED light bulbs, and they’d have little clue of what you were talking about.”

Into this technology development maelstrom enters Scout, a software program developed by the U.S. Department of Energy Building Technologies Office (BTO) in partnership with Berkeley Lab and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Scout estimates the national impacts of emerging energy-efficient technologies and systems on building energy use and operating costs, drawing from a consistent energy use baseline, standard energy conservation measure (ECM) definitions, and realistic simulations of stock turnover and ECM competition dynamics. With support from BTO, Scout is now available as a web-based application for sharing Scout’s capabilities with the broader energy analysis community.

“The Scout web app (scout.energy.gov) will be of interest to users who want to know how new energy-saving technologies or approaches fit into the larger U.S. market for energy efficiency—both at present and decades into the future,” said Chioke Harris, an NREL research engineer collaborating with Langevin on the project. Looking for simple definitions of technologies and their national impacts to compare with similar technologies? Visit the ECM Summaries page. Curious about the total impacts of a technology portfolio and which end uses or technologies contribute most to those impacts? The Analysis Results page presents those insights. Just want to know about the status-quo outlook for U.S. building energy use? The Baseline Energy Calculator provides that information.

The web app can help all kinds of folks better understand how energy use in buildings might change with the adoption of energy-efficient technologies, as well as the potential cost savings from those technologies. Companies that own or manage large building portfolios can learn about the financial performance of various technologies using metrics that can help them with the business justification for investing in energy efficiency. Energy policy organizations and nonprofits can look at those same technologies through the lenses of their energy and cost savings potential for a specific region or across the United States. Researchers interested in developing next-generation energy-efficient building technologies can use the baseline energy use projections and ECM definitions to better understand where they can have the greatest impact. Users intrigued by the app can take the leap and download the Scout analysis engine to get results custom tailored to their unique interests.

The Environmental Justice Small Grants (EJSG) program awards grants that support community-driven projects designed to engage, educate, and empower communities to better understand local environmental and public health issues and develop strategies for addressing those issues, building consensus in the community, and setting community priorities. The EJSG program will award approximately $1.5 million nationwide for this competitive opportunity. EPA anticipates awarding approximately 50 grants (5 per EPA Region) of up to $30,000 each. These grants are for one-year projects.

Potential applicants are invited to participate in conference calls with EPA to address questions about the EJSG Program and this solicitation. Interested persons may access the pre-application assistance calls by dialing 866-299-3188 and entering the code 202-564-6349# when prompted. The following are the conference call dates and times:

1. Micro scale: proposals for projects aimed at developing ideas that are still at infant stage; with project budgets under 50,000 US dollars;
2. Small-scale: proposals for projects to build partnerships with budgets between 100,000 and 200,000 US dollars
3. Medium scale grant (a): proposals for projects that will render high impact and with budgets up to 500,000 US dollars
4. Medium scale grant (b): proposals for implementation of activities contributing to the shift to Sustainable Lifestyles from Regional Roadmaps for Sustainable Consumption and Production with budgets up to 300,000 US dollars

We are looking to hire two post-docs at LBNL to do research on high performance homes, retrofits, and metrics of IAQ and health impact. One position is with the residential group where we are looking for IAQ and building retrofit experience:

The NIH, in partnership with USAID, the CDC, the EPA and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC), launched a Clean Cooking Implementation Science Network (ISN) to advance the science of uptake and scale-up of clean cooking technology in the developing world. Sustained, near-exclusive use of clean cooking technology is understood to be key to improving multiple important health outcomes by reducing exposure to household air pollution.

About the Clean Cooking ISN

Hosted by the Center for Global Health Studies (CGHS) at Fogarty, and supported by the NIH Common Fund, the primary goal of the Clean Cooking ISN is to advance the scientific understanding of how to implement evidence-based clean cooking interventions to maximize their benefits to the health and longevity of populations in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Significant implementation challenges exist in the clean cooking arena concerning the adoption and use of technologies that reduce pollutant exposures sufficiently to achieve health benefits. These challenges can multiply when the goal is scaling up these technologies. Successful scale-up will depend on understanding the complex interplay among multiple environmental, economic, behavioral and other setting-specific factors.

To meet its objectives, the Clean Cooking ISN aims to foster collaboration among researchers and implementers. Each year since 2016, the Network has supported projects designed to advance the science of clean cooking implementation at scale.